The teaser trailer dropped on Instagram and TikTok. In the voiceover, she said things like, “I thought family meant safety,” and “Sometimes the most challenging people are the ones you share a last name with.”
It was so theatrical it felt scripted. But she wasn’t done. At the end of the video, she thanked a sponsor, a therapy app—the exact one I’d introduced her to a year earlier when she called me from the bathroom of a bar, crying about a panic attack. She’d signed a real deal. They reposted her video. She got over 10,000 views in 24 hours.
People in the comments were eating it up, calling her brave, asking for advice, telling her they related. I didn’t care about the podcast itself, but something about it made me feel unsettled, like I was being slowly written into someone else’s fiction.
Then came the twist I never saw coming. She emailed me. Subject line: “Let’s talk.” The body was short:
“I’d like to meet. No drama, just a conversation. I have things I want to tell you. I think you’ll be proud of me.”